


hopeless noise

by ghost_milk



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Second Person, karkat is hopelessly in love and dave writes songs about it, karkat's pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-07 01:25:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15898095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_milk/pseuds/ghost_milk
Summary: He jams his big ugly headphones over your ears and presses a button softly on his tableturns or whatever the fuck and you are suddenly immersed in a rhythm that reminds you of both a heartbeat and the ocean, rolling and making it feel like you can’t breathe quite right. You hear something sharp and snapping like beads landing on a metal table and you wonder what he alchemized to accomplish that.





	hopeless noise

“What are you writing?” you ask him. Your mouth is full and you’re pretty sure you may have just spit some of your popcorn in his direction but he’s used to you at this point so you don’t bother apologizing. 

He keeps writing for a moment before he seems to realize you spoke. You are about to clear your throat to get his attention and also maybe dislodge some kernels but he answers.

“It’s a...uh, song,” he says. You duly note that he did not say something like: _the illest new jam thats ever going to be got written, or the coolest douchiest lyrics this side of paradox space so tight you’ll feel like you have to drop a few pounds._

Your Dave impersonation is getting better with practice, you think. His Karkat is better.

At any rate, all this means is that it’s probably something he’s shy about so you just nod once. “Not more slam poetry, I hope,” you say and you wish your voice didn’t sound so much like how it does. You tried to make it soft, and you think maybe he gets that. It allows him to pretend you didn’t absolutely pick up on his insecure tone.

He looks at you with an expression you can't quite place and chuckles softly, a soft puff of air that makes your hands feel like television static. Unfortunately he usually says something extremely dumb right after it.

“We all know my slam poetry is so sick you need to go on bedrest for days after hearing just the first note.” 

So yeah. You snort, and it’s a hideous sound. “Bedrest for days maybe, but because of the projectile vomit spewing out of me from how awful it is.” 

He smiles at you because he knows it was a bad joke and that is so kind of him that before you can dwell on it you ask, “What’s it about?”

You see his hands twitch like maybe he wants to snatch his notebook up and cover his words. You’re not really offended, not more than your usual state of being anyway. It’s not like you’d be quick to offer up your lengthy fanfictions for him to take a sneak peek at if he asked to see your notebook. 

But then again maybe you would. If he asked. Probably. Who knows.

After a moment of you pondering a hypothetical inquisition and him fussing with his pen and folding over and smoothing out the corner of the page a few times you hear him quietly say, “You can read it if you want.” 

You school your expression to not seem shocked but you’re pretty sure you fail miserably. Hiding your emotions hasn't ever really been your thing and you both know it. He hands it over and you look at him for a moment longer--double checking, and he nods--before letting your eyes carry over the words. 

The first thing you notice is how different his handwriting looks when he’s not writing big stupid print letters for his shitty drawings. It’s soft and loopy and kind of hard to read, but considering you’re used to your own crooked, scratched alternian, you think you can manage. 

The words on the page are all extremely poetic and honestly they might not be half bad but they don’t make any sense next to one another. Maybe you’re just stupid? When you finish reading the page you’re compelled to read it over again. So you do. 

There’s a rhythm in it but you can’t figure it out. You think it would sound better if you read it out loud but you might consider crawling in an actual hole and actually dying before doing that.

So you read it quietly to yourself just once more, to be sure. It takes a certain energy out of you, you think, and you also think it’s in a really good way. Like watching a sad movie takes the energy out of you.

You’re thinking about that when he says, “Alright, okay.” Drawling out his words he continues, “I didn’t think it was _good_ but to silence the literally unsilenceable Karkat from saying anything at all that’s just like, hot sauce in a salted wound. You’ve been quiet for four minutes and seventeen seconds? New record I think. I should start a new bingo chart. Quiet Karkat Bingo. Much harder.”

Your eyes jump from the page and you kind of forgot he was waiting on you, his written words were so distracting. When Dave is nervous he uses specific and accurate time measurements and you always notice because you think it’s extremely annoying when he does that.

So you say, “Don’t do that,” and he makes a noise in his throat.

Maybe the words don’t make any sense but they _are_ beautiful. You try to think of something positive to say but you’re afraid of how you might screw it up and accidentally call him stupid or something. You do have that tendency. 

So you think before you speak for once in your life and you can feel his anxious stare sinking into your face. 

“It’s just like I slammed a bunch of sopor slime is all,” you finally say. You try to make your voice kinder so that it doesn’t sound like an insult. You’re sure he knows you well enough by now to know that it isn’t one. “It’s good, but feel like I’m stuck inside a jar of honey. That's not how your brain always works is it?” 

Dave looks like he’s thinking about it. He glances at his words quickly and says, “Yeah, pretty much.”

“No wonder you sound like such a fucking asshole all the time, if I had to dredge coherency out of a think pan that looked like that I’d be fucking comatose before breakfast.” 

And he laughs, which you think is good. 

“You like it though?” he asks. To be honest, it’s refreshing that he no longer dances around asking for validation from you. It’s still a nightmarish trainwreck watching him interact with anyone that isn’t you though, and you think that’s pretty amusing. You think some other things about it too even though you try not to.

“I like it,” you say. “It’s hard to read but maybe that’s because I don’t have the music.” 

He nods and says “Cool,” and goes back to writing. “Makes sense,” he says under his breath, barely audible. You listen to his foot tap and his muttering mutter and turn back to your novel and popcorn. 

He nudges you with his foot an indeterminable amount of time later and he pushes his notebook into your hands again. 

You read the words again, better prepared this time for the poetic nigh troll e.e. Cummings string of nonsense that you’re about to try and process. It’s easier to take this time. The words form somewhat coherent imagery in your head. You can tell how important it is to him, and as you read you start to feel emotional, as if that isn’t your constant state of being. You tap on a particularly clunky sentence and tell him it’s kind of odd. He deflates a bit, but you sit up and set your book aside to clarify that it just doesn’t seem to match the rest.

Some of the words you plain don’t understand at all, you’ve never even seen them before, and when you ask he explains that they’re _spanish._ You don’t know what the fuck _spanish_ is so he explains that to you too. Apparently he knows quite a bit of it because he’s from a _Texas_ and that had something to do with a _Mexico,_ whatever the fuck that all is. Honestly you had no idea that the english language wasn’t the only earth language so the concept is sort of blowing your mind. 

“I just want to try something new,” he says. “Experimental. Maybe cool it with the showboaty rap songs and try to actually make something like…” he crosses out the word that you pointed out was funny and writes something different over it. 

“Something...?” you prompt. 

He shrugs. “I don’t know.” Embarrassed, you think, reverting back into his aloof tastemaker posture. 

“Well, it’s not total hoofbeast-shit,” you say and crunch the last of the kernels in the bottom of your bowl. You sort of meant to tell him that you genuinely like it, that you could feel the words in your stomach, even if they don’t seem to make any sense. He nods like he knows that’s what you meant. 

At this point though, it’s late and you’re tired and you want to avoid falling asleep on the couch and waking with your arms slung around him and a mouthful of his hair like the last time, so you tell him goodnight and gather your things. 

-

It becomes _A Thing._ You’re sort of surprised about it in the way that you are always surprised whenever someone seems to genuinely want to be near you or actually listen to you talk with your admittedly long winded opinions. You’re also sort of not surprised because this is actually pretty typical behavior for the both of you. He’s your best friend. 

After a few weeks his book becomes full and he alchemizes a new one. He lets you read it all, and he reads them to you sometimes instead, like tonight, when it’s late and your eyes are so tired that you can’t help but close them. You’re in his room and you’re sitting on his bed, your legs dangling off the side and still too short to touch the ground. His entire room is bathed in a weird reddish pink color from the glow of different screens and strings of lights he described as christmas lights, but you liked the term fairy lights better. Rose called them that. 

Anyway, the point is that it’s always really warm and inviting in Dave’s room despite the metal walls and hazardous mess of electronics cords zig-zagging across the floor. You wonder if it’s because he put a lot of effort into making it so or if you’re projecting your feelings for him onto his room. It’s always warm in here and the constant hum of his things matches the constant hum in your limbs when you’re around him.

His voice is stuck in the same tone as he repeats the same words over and over. You think he’s talking about somebody’s knees, but the narrative may have changed since you picked up on that bit, you kind of zoned out listening to the low drawl of his voice instead of the words it was producing.

You honest to God think that most of his songs are just word association brain spills that he assembles into patterns which can, at times, be too infuriating the trudge through. 

You think that he’s gotten much better even if his lyrics still don’t make sense, they sound really good near one another. You still haven't heard him sing though, and you hope he might let you. Yesterday he played you the tune to one of the ones he must have known you prefer and you desperately want to feel all the pieces of his work together. He says something that suspiciously sounds like he’s talking about those knees again and you tell him to “Stop—” 

When he does you can still hear the hum of something whirring in the room or possibly in the vents. You can never really tell. 

“All of this about knees?” you ask. “Still? Whose knees are that interesting?” 

“The bee’s knees,” he answers quickly. “Who the fuck cares?” 

“I was just wondering,” you say and it sounds grouchier than you intended, but you’re offended and what else is new. Grouchy as it may have been your voice comes out slowly, your alternian accent croaking, making you sound absolutely atrocious. 

But whatever, he’s used to it. 

He gives you a look and you tell him that he can continue and he does. You’re pretty sure you hear the word ‘grey’ a lot which is funny to you in your sleepy state. You like the color grey. You lose track of his words when he gets too repetitive and you fall asleep. 

You briefly hear him get up presumably to sit at his table, but you stay snoozing under the blankets he drapes over you.

-

It isn’t until many months later that you hear it for the first time. He brings you to his room, thinly veiled excitement spilling out in his body language in all the ways that you’ve grown used to picking up. The slight shake in his hands, the way he’s not quite smiling but you can see his teeth clearly while he talks, and his voice is about an octave higher, but still flat as hell. 

He drags you in by the arm and sits you on a stool in front of some of his more intimidating looking sound equipment. 

“I was on a roll last night,” he tells you while he fusses with some things. You’re honestly not even going to attempt to guess at what the things he’s touching are for. “On a goddamn roll like some I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-butter at a community picnic.” 

You laugh even though you can’t even attempt to find the metaphor relatable. You open your mouth to throw some sort of insult at him but he makes a zip-it motion with his hands — strong non-words from a boy that can literally never shut the fuck up, you think — but still you fall silent to pay attention to what he’s so excited about. 

He jams his big ugly headphones over your ears and presses a button softly on his tableturns or whatever the fuck and you are suddenly immersed in a rhythm that reminds you of both a heartbeat and the ocean, rolling and making it feel like you can’t breathe quite right. You hear something sharp and snapping like beads landing on a metal table and you wonder what he alchemized to accomplish that. 

After a few heavy seconds of this noise that is making a home for itself by heavily rattling through your chest cavity you hear a small cough and then Dave’s voice. It’s the song about the knees you realize almost immediately, only now it seems to also be about hands and cheekbones too, something about being slow and going soft and then something in that earth language that isn’t english. 

You listen intently and absolutely refuse to look at Dave while doing so. A weird repetitive noise keeps happening that almost hurts your ears but is too beautiful to feel like it’s doing so. Like someone is running their wet finger around the top of a glass. 

Dave’s singing voice is about one million times better than his speaking voice, which maybe isn’t saying much, you think, because you already find his voice incredibly attractive to begin with, but still. The song is only just under three minutes long but it fills you with such intense emotion that when it stops almost abruptly but perfectly all the same all you can say is, “Wow.” 

You want to listen to it again but you don’t know how to ask him to let you, so you clumsily pull the headphones off and hand them to him. 

“Right?” he says. He’s clearly proud but it also looks like he’s waiting for you to say more.

You’re afraid to say anything though so you just nod, and then nod again. Like a bobblehead, you try to emit how proud of him you are through the shaking of your big dumb thinkpan alone. 

He smiles and reaches across the table to give you a super uncomfortable hug that presses your stomach against the hard edge of plastic table and a messy tangle of cords. You smile and pat his back. 

-

The next time he finishes a song, he seems much more reluctant to show you. 

“It’s different,” he says. And you don’t know what that means, his music already sounds so wildly different from anything you’ve ever heard before in your entire life. 

He seems much less excited and much more scared and when the tones start you are unfortunately immediately aware of what kind of song it’s going to be. You’re equally surprised and not surprised that he didn’t show you the lyrics to this one before he plays it for you. 

A tangle of anger and sadness and despair are whispered into your ears as Dave frantically narrates a story of a young brother being dropped off of a high roof. You hear his words about being wrapped up in a cloth and stuffed away, about being careful and taking quiet steps. The song seeps into a slow ebb of tones that reminds you a little bit of a horror movie. You think about his lusus and you think about all the time he has been alive that you didn’t know him.

Your face is contorting into a big mess of an expression and you’re all touched and bewildered and terrified that he wants you to hear this. The words are horrible and you hate them. They are carefully crafted and too-aware in a way that makes you feel like absolute garbage for him. He is looking at you and you can see the panic in his eyes behind the dark shades that he doesn’t usually wear anymore. 

Makes sense now that they’re on.

Suddenly the horrifically sad instrumental erupts into a loud racket of instruments that disrupts the melancholic even flow. It takes you by surprise that you almost, to your absolute horror, start to cry. 

It stops about as fast as it started and oozes into an uncomforting atmospheric tone that reminds you of a dead hospital patient in a human movie and it makes you angry and you feel so uncomfortably alone and you know that he feels so uncomfortably alone. You rip your headphones off and pull him into you. 

He wasn’t expecting you to take it so hard, you can tell, and he tries to joke you off but you crush him until he can’t breathe. His arms are crushed to his sides and he can’t hug you back, but you can feel him shake in your arms and you tuck your face into his shoulder and stay there. 

He grabs right around your middle once you finally make the move to step back, keeping you in place. You feel his fingers tangle into the hem of your sweater and you try to whisper to him but your voice is what it is so it comes out harsh and loud. 

You tell him how amazing he is, and how cool it is that you get to know him, how great it is that he’s alive and that he’s a person. 

He doesn’t say anything about that but he does pull you closer, absolutely fucking impossibly closer.

When he does finally let go he stares at you and stares at you. You don’t have the words for him so you try to stare at him back in a meaningful way. He folds his glasses up and crawls into his bed. He aimlessly pats the space next to him and it takes a moment to realize that it's an invitation. You take great care in turning off his sound equipment and wrapping up his headphones before making the small journey to joining him. You pull the blanket over the both of you and you let his hands get lost in your shirt again. It’s going to get all stretched out on the bottom, but the joke’s on him you guess since this is the sweater he likes to borrow the most. 

“Do you want to sleep?” you ask. 

“No,” he says back. “This is cool.” He nods at you and you nod back. 

“It was really good,” you say. You try to thank him for letting you listen but you’re not the best with your words when they come out of your mouth so you just frown instead. 

He sighs and tucks his face against your arm. “It was really good,” he repeats. “Thanks for listening to it.” 

“I hated it,” you say. And he makes a hopeless noise into your sleeve. 

You nod again and he stays there. You tell him stories about your lusus and he listens. You tantrum and tangent and talk until you can’t think of anything else to say. Which means you say quite a lot. When you’ve exhausted your stories, he tells you some about his and you listen. You both frown, and you both feel the heavy presence of each other tucked into his small bed frame. 

You can still hear that sad tone in your ears like a deafening alarm and you press your toes against his shin. 

He slips his socked foot between your bare ones and sighs at you. You don’t know what any of this means and you are so flushed red in the moment that you can’t even begin to insult yourself for being a fucking idiot. 

-

“So I was wondering,” he asks you one night, many nights later. 

“Mmm,” you sort of say back. He’s been working on the music to another song. He’s been over at his desk cutting up and putting together some previously recorded sounds using a weird little contraption and sometimes interrupting your book-reading to make you listen and give him opinions. The tune makes you think of an unraveling sweater and the color of Rose’s lipstick. 

“Would you like, maybe let me sample your voice?” he asks. 

You don’t respond right away because the recording is doing something really sweet and gentle and also you’re afraid of what he means by that. 

When the tune clicks off you ask, “For what?”

“A duet, sort of,” he says. His legs are wrapped around the post of his chair and he swivels back and forth as he waits for you to speak. 

“I don’t sing,” you say roughly. “Besides are you looking to ruin the fuck out of your song or what? You could just as easily drill actual nails into my ear drums and get the same effect.” 

“You don’t drill nails, dipshit,” he says, and you laugh. “And you don’t have to sing, you just have to talk. I have an idea.” 

“No,” you say, “No fucking way.” 

He slips from the chair with a theatrical puff of air and lands in an ungraceful heap on the ground. 

“Please?” he says. There’s no tone and no inflection at all. He’s extremely weird and you find it extremely charming. 

“No,” you repeat. 

“Karkat,” he says.

“No,” you snap your book closed and give him a look.

He rolls to his back and grabs your ankle that is hanging off the side of his bed and he says, “Please?” You look down at him and you wonder, not for the first time, if he knows how you feel about him. If he likes you back. And to be honest, you’re pretty sure he does but he’s an absolute idiot and you’ve never asked and he’s never told. You’re not the type to assume anyone likes you for any reason at all so this makes it all the more stupid when you sigh and say, “okay.” 

He slaps the floor like it’s the best news he’s ever heard. 

-

It’s been a few weeks since he asked and you still haven’t had the courage to let him grab your voice through his mic, and he hasn’t pressed at all. Instead, he just quietly slips you some more lyrics here and there and you pointedly avoid giving back any critique out of fear you may actually have to stick to your word and ruin one of his songs. 

Anyway you get lost in the loops of his handwriting sometimes, like right now, and you find yourself squinting under the scribbles of crossed out and tossed out lines because you like to look at what he wants to throw away as much as you like to listen to what he decides to keep. 

Under some of the scratches you see the word horns, or at least you think you do, and that really makes you squint harder. Two different kinds of horns come to mind and you realize quite quickly which type of horns you want him to be talking about. The words around it are completely incomprehensible and it makes you kind of angry in a not at all angry kind of way. Your stomach flips as you consider that he must most certainly mean the toot-toot, rat-at-tat kind of horns, not the sorry nubs on the top of your head kind. 

You absently push your hair back and roll off your bed. You make the short walk through the halls to Dave’s room and you walk in like it’s your own and he says hi without looking up like he was expecting you, like you belong there. 

You make a noise and head for his pile of notebooks, which you open to read as you throw yourself across his bed. 

“Alright,” he says with that dumb puff-of-air laugh that he does and you ignore him. 

He goes back to doing whatever he was doing and you start reading your favorites over again. 

You don’t know what you’re looking for, not really, but you _are_ looking with reckless abandon. You consider your feelings and you consider your thoughts and you very, very briefly consider what will happen if you find what you might sort of want to find, if you knew what that was. 

It’s not like he would write songs _about_ you, but you wonder if you make an appearance in any of them. The problem is that his structure and prose is all goofy and weird and you can’t tell what is presented as a legitimate thought and what is mindless word association à la David. You’re not dumb, and logically you know how much he looks at you because you’re always around him, and you selfishly want to see if anything indicates that he thinks about you while you’re not around.

You eventually stop because you don’t want him to think that you’re ignoring him, and you hang out for a bit. He tells you a story about John that makes you laugh so hard you hit him to make him stop talking so you can catch your breath. His smile shows all his teeth and you wonder what his mouth would feel like on yours. 

You borrow his notebooks on the way out and he lets you because he doesn’t know what you’re up to, he would have no reason to think that you were up to something at all. You sit on the floor of your room and carefully read his songs taking note of anything that seems suspicious. Some of the lines feel romantic but don’t sound romantic. When you read it your mouth is cottony, and your thoughts sound like they’re spelled wrong.

Ultimately you come to the conclusion that anything you found was not about you, just that you particularly loved it. You briefly decide to sleep on it, and you’re fully prepared to ignore the issue altogether. A fluke of too many feelings getting energized into the wrong task.

-

Weeks later you are succumbed to Dave’s wishes and find yourself sitting on his stool with a big microphone shoved up into your space. 

“You just have to speak,” he says softly and he touches your shoulder. You’re not nervous, necessarily, but you are kind of irritated. Confused and flattered and annoyed and happy, but not nervous. He asked you to help make something and you want to. 

You are only saying individual words with long pauses between, he explained to you that he would be moving it all around anyway. You have zero concept of what his endgame idea is but you guess that’s the point. 

You take a deep breath and he has you all connected in. You say words like: you, down, and, jumping, later, boy. You hope the harshness of your own voice doesn’t ruin the soft weird perfection of his. 

He smiles as you speak and you feel praised, like you’re doing a good job. He has you repeat a few words and you happily do so. When he thinks it’s good, he lets you go and you don’t go far because you drop right onto the floor and lean against his bed. 

You can’t get the intrusive thoughts out of your thinkpan that some of his songs might be about you. You want him to like you and you have an entire conspiracy scenario where he doesn’t give you songs about you, but that he has them elsewhere. Which you think is so frustratingly stupid because other than your own rose-tinted thoughts, there’s no indication that he feels flushed for you at all. 

Maybe he’s entirely pale. He asked you about that once but not about you, just in general. He doesn’t like troll romance very much and if you’re being honest with yourself you don’t like it much anymore either. The human concept of a boyfriend is one that is so enticing to you that you swallowed your pride and plugged it into a search engine. One person in all four quadrants, for lack of the vocabulary was something that has definitely occurred to you in the past but you were unaware of the reality of it.

While you work your thinkpan into a deep fry about it, you play an earth console called the Nintendo 64, which reminds you of the Clawcube from your early years, but the Nintendo controller is admittedly much easier. Rose and Dave spent a long time figuring out how to alchemize one and you guess they say it’s not perfect, but you like it. 

Dave works away and stuff, he stops for a moment to absolutely beat your ass in two player mode, and then he leaves for a bit. You assume he’s with Rose. 

When he comes back you’re almost asleep on the floor with the title screen to a game about a little green elf on loop. So he taps you with his foot and you make a nasty alternian noise and he crouches down and tells you that if you’re tired you should get in bed. He holds out his hand to help you up but you crankily take his hand and pull him down and decide to stay put. 

He makes an ungracious sound as the wind gets knocked out of him and you laugh, right in his face. 

“Hey,” you say, and it might have been in alternian. The words are almost the same.

“What.” He says it mean, like he’s mad that you just pulled him onto the floor. 

You don’t say anything and he breathes on your face. You want to ask if he thinks about you the same way you think about him. But you don’t.

When you wake up, you wish that you had moved to the bed.

-

You are in love. 

It’s weird to use a word that doesn’t exist in your language or culture, especially one like _that,_ but you think it’s true. Or, you realize it’s true literally right now, watching him sit with his legs all tangled up over the arm of his chair while he stares at the ceiling muttering to himself, making confusing hand gestures that represent the beat that he hears in his head. 

You don’t know what to make of that but you find yourself breathing pretty shallowly. This isn’t really how it happens in your romance novels, but you’re not at all disappointed about that. This seems...better. 

You watch him excitedly jolt forward, almost pitching himself from his chair all together to furiously scribble in his newest notebook. He’s wearing one of your shirts. 

You want to tell him, but you don’t want to interrupt his creative flow so you just keep watching him instead. You figure you can always tell him later. He’s not going anywhere, and the revelation makes you feel...smarter. Like you can think better, or more like you’re capable of thinking _more._ Untapped knowledge. It’s like you finally busted open the padlock that has been latching shut the top secret files and since he’s not going anywhere any time soon, you have time to process the top secret files’ top secret information.

You indulge, a little, by thinking about his mouth and his cheekbones. You think about it under the pretense of your new found knowledge and startle yourself over how much you realize you want to. Kiss him. Because this is no longer a fleeting thought bubble punched away by confused and half-angry fists. This is _intent._

You think about the song about the knees, and you think about that hellish deep tone of the sad song you know he has saved somewhere, unlistened to aside from that one time. 

You think about how you scanned his notebooks to see if he wrote about you however many months ago, and how you know that he did even if you foolishly dismissed it as wishful thinking. The knees are your knees and the hands are your hands and suddenly it feels too hot to be wearing a sweater. 

You frown because you’re nervous about how your self deprecation and anxiety is going to take the news. The love news. You look at him for a little bit longer and wonder if you are allowed to feel love. 

But it’s definitely love and you ask him to play the song about the knees - even though you know that he properly titled it “Something,” but you call it that anyway. The Song About The Knees.

But not just the knees. 

_The song about me._

He gives you a look, but puts it on anyway and you say thanks.

-

The song that you’re in is terrible. Or, well no, not terrible. But you do hate it. 

Irrationally so, you absolutely hate how incredible he is and how amazing it turned out. He took the scraps of your voice and slotted them right up against the soft easiness of his own. It sounds like the two of you are reading every other word of a story together and it’s got this gentle breeze of a tune that just makes you feel...a lot. 

On the second listen the words make as much sense as they ever do, but you’re used to them now. You’re so used to him and how his brain works that it’s pretty easy to tell from the crazy narration that it’s about a boy throwing a rock into a lake only the rock is a kiss and it’s on the back of a neck and—you think— that Dave is telling you something. 

You’re so angry and so in love that you want to tackle him to the floor and kiss him until he passes out but you’re scared so you sit still with a dry throat and sweaty palms. The song ends. 

Again.

He stares at you as you skip back to the beginning to play it over, and god your voice really _is_ horrible. His voice is so soft and yours is an absolute wreck and it sounds so perfect together you want to smash your head on the table. Because it’s the two of you together and that’s how it should be. You listen to the both of you talk to each other with such seamless frequency that listening to this sounds so painfully comfortable and casual, and the song is literally about how Dave likes you back, and the absolute useless douchebag is telling you so by using your own god damn shit awful fucking voice to say it. 

“I hate it,” you say, and he smiles all huge and dumb. 

“What the fuck,” you say. Your voice from your mouth is a cacophonous mess over your voice from the speakers.

“I wanted—” 

“Dave,” you interrupt. He’s not nervous or shy and that’s infuriating. His face is bright and shades-less and looks like how your own face feels when you look at him. 

“Dave,” you say again, and he fucking laughs at you. 

The song ends again and you gesture wildly at the turntables and he covers his face with his hands like he’s going to pretend to be bashful. What a fucker. 

“Karkat,” he says. Fuck. 

You still want to kiss him but you don’t know how so you just stare at him and hope he comes over to you. He eats it up cause you think he knows damn well what you want and he just stays standing there peeking through his fingers like an asshole. 

You feel how hot your face is when you say, “Thank you,” and you’re absolutely mortified that that’s what just came out of your mouth. 

You don’t notice that time slows down, and you only barely notice him land in your lap, but what you do notice is that his mouth is smushed up against yours and you literally bark your laughter into it because you can’t control how happy you are. 

He pulls back and looks down at your probably dumbfounded looking face. He shifts his weight and now his knees are on both sides of your hips and he's heavy like he belongs there. Your hands settle on his thighs and he says “Thank you, too.” 

And you don’t know for what and you’re mortified that he thinks he needed to thank you back when you don’t even know for sure what you thanked him for first. But you’re so so so happy that you just ignore it and look at him for a little bit longer. 

His face gets closer and you realize it’s time for a real kiss and you’re terrified and thrilled and you press your lips against his with such intensity that you forget who you are. You forget who he is too. Your energy is so erratic that you almost slip out of your chair and bring him down with you.

When he pulls back you chase after him, accidentally, but not exactly involuntarily. He kisses you again and it’s as soft as his voice sounds and you’re definitely going to—no, yep, you’re already crying. 

“Dave,” You say, ‘cause it’s all you know how to say now. 

“Mmm,” he hums, and his mouth is still close enough to yours that you can feel that hum in your teeth.

-

“Stop writing about me,” you say and you sound legitimately angry about it. 

You’re not angry. But you are, because you have no way to return the favor. 

“I remember—” Dave starts to say but you can’t hear what else he says over your own loud groaning. You know he remembers you pining and you know he remembers when you took all of his notebooks to desperately look for clues and you _know_ that he remembers that you didn’t find anything even though there was plenty to be seen.

You know.

“Where has that bashful spark gone,” he wails in fake wonder. “The shy boy who stole my heart. Nervous if I was thinking about him too.” 

You take off your sock and throw it at him. 

“Where did he go, Karkat?” Dave asks. 

“He’s right here and he’s pissed off,” you say. You’re sitting on his bed and he’s standing close by but not close enough.

Dave makes a clicking _“cshh,”_ sound and you hide your face in your hands. 

“Stop writing about me,” he repeats you in this shit ass voice like your request was incredulous. “I still have shit to say,” he says. 

You don’t know what he means, but you think maybe you kind of do. You admittedly think about him all the time it’s just impossible to consider that he probably thinks about you that much too. So maybe you can’t write songs or make romantic gestures but you _can_ reach out and grab him by the bottom of his shirt to pull him over to you. 

You notice that he uses his god powers to not trip on his way over, and you don’t call him out on it. 

He’s standing between your legs and looking down at you.

You are bad at expressing yourself and you always have been. Your voice is loud and it’s mean and almost entirely incapable of saying nice things. 

But what your mouth is capable of is kissing, so that’s what you do.

And the most amazing part about it is that you didn’t even need to reach up and pull him down. 

‘Cause he met you halfway.

**Author's Note:**

> in case you were wondering - here's a spotify playlist that features some of the songs that I was listening to when i wrote this 
> 
> https://open.spotify.com/user/1223078671/playlist/7DNsZF9wd1E0tdqFW6S2l1?si=ujeVJgYhS1eMoVCcS9VHXQ


End file.
